Shadows Over Paradise (16 page)

We faced forward, and now saw that at the front of the field was a platform on which a woman was standing. She was
Belanda Indo
—a person of Dutch and Indonesian parentage. Holding up a megaphone, this woman informed us, in Malay, that she was the camp’s translator. She told us that during
tenko
we must all face east toward Japan. She explained that the commandant would soon arrive, and that when he did, she would shout
Kiotsuke!
—“Attention!”—and then
Keré!
which meant “Bow!” It was important to bow in the correct way, she went on, because we were really bowing to the Japanese emperor. To bow in a sloppy way would be to insult His Imperial Majesty, and we would be punished. She then explained that we had to bend from the waist at an angle of thirty degrees, and that we must stay like that until we heard
Naore!
—“Stand up!”—after which would come the command
Yasume!
—“Dismiss.” The translator added that we must also bow to any and every Japanese soldier, but must never look them in the eye, since we were “not worthy.” Should we dare to do so, we would be severely punished.

Peter looked stricken. “We’ll be punished?”

“Yes. If we look the soldiers in the eye,” my mother whispered, “or don’t bow correctly.”

“Why do we have to bow?” he demanded. “It’s silly. I won’t!”

“You
must
,” my mother hissed.

I remembered the promise that we’d made our dad.

“I’ll bow,” I whispered. “And you have to do it too, Pietje. No arguments, remember?”

Our mother sighed with relief. “Thank you, children.” Her face shone with perspiration. “Let’s just hope the commandant comes soon.”

But he didn’t come, and the temperature was rising by the minute. We’d been standing there for three hours. Sweat trickled down our foreheads, stinging our eyes; it plastered our clothes to our backs. We had to brush ants off our feet and ankles
and swat away flies. As the sun rose ever higher, I thought of Ferdi, and of how concerned my father had been to provide shade for that little animal; but here we were, women and children, exposed for hours to the sun’s rays with no hats or sunglasses permitted, and not even the elderly or infants allowed to sit down. Now I understood why Greta, normally so pale, was dark brown.

All around us babies wept and screamed; people sobbed and begged for water; a woman in front of us collapsed but was jerked onto her feet by two guards. Peter, exhausted, kept trying to lie on the ground, so Mum and I held him upright between us.

At last the commandant arrived. He carried a whip, and his tall black boots shone in the sun. His sword hung from his waist. I couldn’t help staring at it, imagining it slicing and slashing …

“
Keré
!” screamed the interpreter. We all bowed.

“Lower,” my mother whispered to Peter and me. “Get right down!”

“Why?” Peter asked.

“Just
do
it!” I said.

“Naore!”

We all straightened up.

The interpreter jumped off the platform, and the commandant sprang onto it, like a fox. He planted his legs wide, folded his arms, then shouted that we were extremely fortunate to be guests of the Japanese emperor, and to be under the benevolent protection of the Imperial Japanese Army. In return for this benevolent protection, he went on, we had to behave well, never try to escape, keep ourselves clean, and dress modestly. We weren’t to gamble, drink alcohol, or brawl, and we had to speak
only Japanese or Malay, not Dutch, which was forbidden. Most of all, we must do “useful work.”

“Keré!”
shouted the interpreter again. Everyone bowed as the commandant strode off.

“Yasume!”
We were dismissed. I felt giddy with relief. As Greta and I walked off the field, she told me that she and her grandmother had been in this camp for a year. We talked about our classmates, but she didn’t know what had happened to any of them; she said that there were many other camps where they might be. “We’re all prisoners now,” she added quietly.

When my mother, Peter, and I reached our new home, the woman that we’d spoken to in the morning told us that her name was Kirsten, and that she’d been here in Bloemencamp for a year.

“Could you tell me where the school is?” my mother asked her.

“School?” Kirsten roared with laughter. “There’s no school! The Japs have forbidden education.”

“I see.” Mum looked at Peter and me. “Then I’ll just teach you myself.”

“Oh, you won’t be up to it,” Kirsten said. “You’ll be too tired.”

Mum bristled. “I shall be fine, thank you.”

“You won’t,” Kirsten insisted. “You’ll be exhausted.” My mother bit her lip but didn’t reply. I could see that she didn’t much like Kirsten.

The next day Mum was assigned work, as a “furniture lady.” Her job was to haul furniture out of abandoned houses and load it onto a two-wheeled wooden cart that would normally be
pulled by a horse or a buffalo. Once the cupboards, tables, and chairs were piled high, my mother, along with Kirsten and a woman called Loes, had to pull the cart to another, already emptied house, and carry in the furniture to be stored there ready for any Japanese people to use in the future.

Within a week of starting this, my mother was noticeably thinner, her face and shins bruised from the heavy work. At the end of each day she would cook for us on the Anglo, but after that, just as Kirsten had predicted, she was too weary to do anything but sleep.

As I was ten, I was made to do chores. Some girls my age had to look after the babies and younger children while their mothers worked, or they had to sweep the streets or sort through the huge pile of rubbish by the gate. I was told that I would be pulling up weeds. This wasn’t easy, as the ground was baked hard and we had to watch out for scorpions. We weren’t allowed to kneel but had to squat on our haunches, which was very uncomfortable. Greta was doing this work too, a few yards from where I was working. One day I saw her succumb to the desire to kneel down. Within seconds a soldier had run over to her, grabbed her by the arm, and yanked her upright. I thought that he’d make her squat down again; instead, he raised his hand and struck her on the cheek. Instinctively, she turned her head and received a second blow on that side of her face. She fell to her knees, then was jerked upright and slapped again. I scrambled to my feet and ran to help her, but another soldier pushed me down, his face twisted with fury.

That night I told my mother what I’d seen.

She closed her eyes for a moment. “Poor Greta,” she murmured. “Poor little girl.”

“But why did that soldier hit her? He didn’t have to
hit
her, did he?”

My mother explained that Japanese soldiers despised prisoners because they themselves would rather commit suicide than suffer the dishonor of surrender. So, to them, European
women
prisoners were beneath contempt, and they hated having to guard us. To make themselves feel better, they vented their rage and frustration on us.

“So, in order not to be hurt by them, we must do whatever they say,” Mum concluded. “We must always bow to them, at once, and
never
look them in the eye. Do you both understand?” We nodded solemnly.

As the days passed, Mum worried about Peter, who was eight, being left alone while she and I worked. She didn’t want him running around the camp, like some of the other boys did, for fear he’d get into trouble with the soldiers. So Mum asked a woman called Ina, who was in her sixties and therefore exempt from work, to look after him. Ina was tall and thin, with hooded eyes, high cheekbones, and a curved nose; she reminded me of the eagle that we’d seen at the zoo. She’d never had children, but she looked after Peter very well. She cooked his food rations, played chess with him, and got him to write his numbers and letters using a stick in the dirt. Whenever she did this she would have to pretend that they were just chatting, because if it had looked as though a lesson was going on, she would have been beaten. In return for her care of Peter, Ina got items of my mother’s clothing.

“Why does Ina
want
your clothes?” I asked Mum. “She’s much taller than you are; they’ll never fit her.” Mum replied that Ina didn’t want to wear the clothes, only to barter them with the
locals. At that time the Japanese still tolerated
gedekking;
crawling under the fence to trade money or jewelry for food or medicine with the people outside.

“Why doesn’t Ina barter her own things?” I demanded. My mother answered that Ina had very few possessions, as she’d already been in two other camps, and so most of what she’d had to start with was gone. “But why do the locals
want
our old clothes?” Mum explained that throughout Java the supply of cotton had dried up, and so the camp inmates traded their garments with the local people for food—a hanky would fetch one egg, a blouse six eggs or a “hand” of bananas. A dress would fetch ten eggs.

“Don’t ever give Ina my silk dress,” I told my mother. “Or Peter’s jacket.”

“I won’t,” she promised, “because I know you’re going to need them.”

As time went on, we got to know the people in “our” house, all except for a woman called Marjolein, who spoke to no one.

“Why doesn’t she speak to anyone?” my mother asked Kirsten.

“Because it’s her house,” Kirsten replied. “She loathes having to share it with thirty strangers; can’t say I blame her.”

Many of the families had been in more than one camp; some had been in Solo and De Wijk in the east, others had been in Muntilan and Ambarawa, in Central Java.

“The Japs are moving everyone westward,” Kirsten remarked.

“Why?” my mother asked.

“They’re herding us into one big ghetto,” Kirsten answered, “to make it easier to control us. That’s why it’s so crowded.”

Every day more trucks arrived, loaded with women and children.
We recognized some from the other plantations, and there were more pupils from my school.

One day, to my joy, I saw Corrie van der Velden getting off a truck with her mother and her twin sisters, who by then were two and a half. They were allocated a room in our house, in the pavilion, and we were so glad to see them, though the twins cried a lot, which made sleeping—never easy—harder than usual. Corrie told me that they had been held in another camp, Karees, for the past year, in southeastern Bandung. They’d been in a house with twenty others, and had lived in the garage. “But now the camp’s being cleared,” Corrie explained, “so they’ve brought us here.” Her father, she added, was in Tjimahi. She had last glimpsed him sitting blindfolded, in the back of a truck, with the rest of his regiment. It had been a shock, she said, to see him like that. Had my own father been blindfolded? I tried to push the awful thought out of my mind.

What I remember most about the house on Orchideelaan was the noise. Day and night we heard the constant mumble of people talking, arguing, shouting, and weeping. One woman sneezed a lot—it sounded like a pistol being fired. Ina was always reading aloud from her Bible—to comfort us, she said, though I found it annoying and upsetting. But the worst thing was hearing babies cry. Their mothers were often too exhausted to comfort them, and too undernourished to be able to breastfeed them.

At that time everyone did their own cooking, using the rations that were provided, as well as food that could be bought from a shop called a
toko
that each family could go to on one day per month. When it was our turn, Peter and I would go there with our mother, but the
toko
had very little on sale and what
there was was very expensive. Dutch money had been banned and replaced with Japanese “guilders,” which were worth far less; worse, the quantities that we could buy were tiny: a teaspoon of salt, a few grams of sugar or bread; a single papaya.

A few weeks after we’d arrived, soldiers burst into the house and took away our stoves. Then the gas supply was shut off, and kitchens were turned into bedrooms to accommodate yet more prisoners. The
toko
was closed. Now we all had to collect our food from the
dapur
, a central kitchen that was just a bamboo shed with old oil drums serving as massive saucepans. These were suspended over open fires and were lifted off them by two of the teenage boys using wooden poles. You had to stand in line with your pans to receive some watery soup, one spoon of horribly starchy rice with a tiny bit of meat and a sliver of onion or carrot stirred into it. There’d be half a slice of rubbery bread, and occasionally an egg or a banana, though these treats would have to be shared between three or four mouths. But even these meager rations were dwindling, and people were getting thinner, though the soldiers always looked well fed.

At
tenko
one morning the commandant informed us that in order to supplement the rations, we now had to grow our own food. We were given spinach and tomato seeds and our back garden was divided into ten sections, one for each family. It was the dry season, and the ground was bone hard. I remember watching Corrie’s mother struggling to break the baked soil with a pickaxe that was nearly as big as she was, while the twins and Corrie napped inside, watched over by Ina, who had taken on the role of benign aunt.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Van der Velden?” I asked. “Can I help you?”

“That’s kind, Klara.” Mrs. Van der Velden leaned on the pickaxe, out of breath. “But you’re far too young to do this sort of work.” She smiled. “And you don’t have to call me Mrs. Van der Velden. Kate will do just fine.”

My mother and Kirsten both helped Kate, and soon the rock-hard earth was dug over and watered and we were able to plant the seeds. They grew well, but we had to watch the plants at night because if we didn’t, people would steal them.

One guard stole in broad daylight. Everyone called him Johnny Tomato, and he’d ride around the camp on his bike, which was too small for him, his neckcloth flapping. If he spotted a ripe tomato, he’d get off his bike, pick it, then eat it right there on the spot. Once I saw him doing this at the house opposite ours; then, just as he was about to get back onto his bike, he stopped. As he stared down the street I followed his gaze and saw Marjolein, her head drooping with exhaustion as she returned from her shift in the
dapur
. Suddenly she looked up, stopped, and bowed. Perhaps she bowed a few seconds too late, or perhaps Johnny was just in a bad mood, but he threw his bike down, ran up to her, and started screaming at her in an enraged staccato that bounced off the walls. Then, to my horror, he took off his rifle and struck her with the butt; then he hit her again, and now he was pounding her shoulders and back, until she lay in the dust, her arms curled round her head. Then, as Kirsten and I rushed to help her, Johnny climbed back onto his bicycle and pedaled away.